Elizabeth (Betsy) Clark

Elizabeth (Betsy) Clark has spent much of her 40-year career studying successful projects and programs and assisting projects in trouble.  Betsy’s career began in 1979 after earning her doctorate in cognitive psychology.  She joined General Electric in Arlington, Virginia where she conducted controlled experiments with computer programmers in order to understand the mental processes involved in programming.  During that time, she was featured in GE’s Annual Report to Stockholders.   Betsy founded Software Metrics Inc in 1982, a Virginia-based consulting company specializing in software cost and schedule estimation and in working with organisations and projects to establish effective measures to track progress, determine objective status, and provide early warning of problems.

Betsy has spent the past 35 years studying large, complex system development projects.  She has reviewed countless defense projects in the US and Australia and well as projects within the Federal Aviation Administration and US Customs and Border Protection.  Betsy is valued for her ability to accurately identify strengths and areas needing improvements and to predict software milestone completion dates.  Her schedule projections for delivery of the software for the world’s largest defence program, the F-35, were credited by the F-35 Program Executive Officer, Lt. Gen. Chris Bogdan, as being the most accurate of the many estimates generated by multiple organisations.

In the late 1990s, she wrote two case studies of the US Navy’s successful F/A-18E/F Super Hornet Program, one from the perspective of the acquisition organisation (NAVAIR) and the other from the perspective of the prime contractor (McDonnell Douglas, now Boeing Corporation).  Betsy also collaborated with Drs. Barry Boehm and Chris Abts to develop a cost model for commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) intensive software systems.  As part of this work, Betsy collected and reported on COTS lessons learned from multiple US agencies including the Federal Aviation Administration, the US Navy and Army, and NASA.  Betsy was a primary contributor to Practical Software and Systems Measurement (PSM) and to the Software Engineering Institute’s core measures.  She has been a consultant to the US Institute for Defense Analyses in the US since 1982.  Betsy is also a principal contributor to Australian Defence’s Schedule Compliance Risk Assessment Methodology (SCRAM).  Betsy was the 2018 recipient of the University of Southern California’s Center for Systems and Software Engineering (CSSE) Lifetime Achievement Award.

Betsy earned her bachelor’s degree from Stanford University and Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley.  Betsy first came to Australia in 1998 and was quickly enamored with the natural beauty and animals of Australia and with the Aussie sense of humour.  After a long career in the US, Betsy moved to Queensland, Australia in 2018.  In 2023, she was granted Australian Permanent Residency and in 2024 applied for Australian citizenship.